


i never said that i was done with my growth

by principessa



Series: all you have is an axe to grind [7]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Act 1, Chasind Hawke, Female Friendship, Gen, Pre-Femslash, Red Hawke (Dragon Age)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-04-19
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:54:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23737174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/principessa/pseuds/principessa
Summary: "Hello Hawke," says Merrill. "I'm off to find a job. Would you like to come with me?"Merrill needs a job. Hawke needs to clear her head. Leadership takes a toll on everyone, human or elf.
Relationships: Female Hawke & Merrill
Series: all you have is an axe to grind [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/891069
Kudos: 3





	i never said that i was done with my growth

**Author's Note:**

> this fic is longer than the work report i have to turn in tomorrow

Merrill rather hates the alienage, except for how she has decided that hating it will only make her more miserable so she -- likes it, she supposes. She can’t that say she loves it, what with the teeming bodies packed on top of one another in tiny tenement flats smaller than a single aravel, and how everyone looks at her in fear (because she is dalish, or because they rightly suspect she is a mage, she isn’t sure). She can’t say she loves it, but she might grow to, maybe. The darkness from Hightown blotting out the sun is almost like being in a forest again!

It’s nothing like that, actually, but Merrill is trying to stay positive. She may be an exile, but she’s certainly not a pessimist. 

She is climbing up out of the alienage -- climbing, because they put the elves in the very bottom of the city, barely above the mineshaft that leads down to the  _ sewers _ because that’s how shemlen see elves, as filth -- while humming a little ditty to herself. Her roommates had told her that the first week would be covered, while she found her feet, but that she’d need to pay it back within the month, so Merrill supposes she needs to find a job. She is mentally going over her skills and finding them rather inapplicable to life in a human city when she passes through the old city slums, which is the slum that is slightly better than the alienage slum, and she’s distracted from her thoughts by the wild row happening on Hawke’s doorstep.

“You don’t get to boss me around every hour of the day,” Bethany is yelling, and people from all the apartments around are leaning out their balconies to watch, oh dear. Merrill supposes she understands, though; it’s rather odd to see Bethany so heated, she’s usually quite sad and quiet. Still, it’s a little disconcerting to see her friend so red and splotchy, throwing her hands in Hawke’s face and shoving her out the door. 

“You’re not my fucking father,” Bethany says with a great deal of finality and a finger jabbed at Hawke’s chest, “But if you want to pretend, be my guest, go brood somewhere where it’ll be welcome, you wretched hag!” She gives Hawke a final shove and then slams the door with great effect, although then someone calls from inside “Watch the door! Landlord hasn’t fixed it yet!” which ruins the drama of it all, in Merrill’s opinion. 

Hawke smacks the door once with the flat of her hand, then makes a fist, and looks as if she’s about to punch it, when Merrill decides to intervene.

“I’d not do that if I were you,” she calls out earnestly from the middle of the courtyard, “You’re very strong, and your hand might go straight through and get stuck.” Hawke whirls around to stare at her as Merrill rambles on. “Of course, you could just yank it back out, but imagine a neighbour comes along with her shopping! You’d have to get the door for her with your hand still stuck in, and it’d be rather awkward, don’t you think?”

Hawke stares at her for a second longer, and then lets out a heavy breath. “Hello, Merrill.”

“Hello, Hawke,” Merrill says serenely. “That was awfully public. It’s very dalish of you, there’s no privacy at all in our clans. Everybody always knows everyone else’s business.”

“I’d hate that,” Hawke says, and scrubs her hands over her face before going to stand with Merrill. 

“It takes getting used to, certainly. I’m off to find a job, would you like to come with me? I’m not sure if it’s a social activity, job-finding. In the clan everyone’s role was assigned when we were children, so the decision was rather out of our hands.”

“That sounds familiar,” Hawke says, and her shoulders loosen a little. That’s good, Merrill thinks, as Hawke always looks so tense. It’s a shame; it ruins the cutting line of her shoulders and back. Hawke has a lovely back, from hauling that greatsword about. “I can come with you. Do you have a trade?”

They set off towards the market, away from the watching eyes of the children and infirm and those who took their single rest day today, cutting through a very violent game of stickball played by grubby shemlen children of indeterminate gender. “I suppose not? I was my clan’s First, which was sort of like a trade.”

Hawke shoots her a warning look, and Merrill wants to pat Hawke’s head patronisingly. Merrill knows the fear of templars as much as Hawke does, if not more. She knows in her bones that a templar would be much kinder to a sweet docile shem girl like Bethany than they would to a savage knife ear blood mage. But better not to remind Hawke of that very real fear when she’s already cross.

“I can read and write,” she ticks off on her fingers, shoving her staff -- which is more of a walking stick now, for all the use it’s getting -- into her armpit to count. “I can recite all of known Elvhen history, although I suppose nobody here would care about that. I can chair a war council,” she brightens, as Kirkwall seems more warlike than any city she’s ever seen, but Hawke doesn’t seem delighted to hear it, so she keeps thinking. “Hm. I can come up with contingencies on what to do if there’s templars, or a plague, or someone is on the verge of being possessed, or decides they want to end their apprenticeship and try something else.”

“You sound like a mayor,” Hawke says. “I want to hear about that war council, at some point.”

“Oh, it’s rather boring,” Merrill says distractedly. “Just consulting with the hunters and warmaster and making a decision based on what’s best for the clan, I suppose. What’s a mayor? Is that a human thing?”

“Like a leader. Turn here.” Hawke reaches out and physically corrects Merrill’s course where she almost tumbled down a mineshaft. Kirkwall is rotten with mineshafts, truly. Maybe that’s why Varric likes it so much, maybe it’s a dwarf thing.

“I was a leader,” Merrill says, and politely asks the lump in her throat to leave now, please. “Although now I’m a nobody, and I rather doubt that the shem will let me into their precious Hightown, so it doesn’t matter much, does it?”

Hawke looks at her down the bridge of her nose, and then looks away quickly, past the Hanged Man and the steps out towards the market plaza. “It’s heavy, right?” she asks, slightly strangled.

“Beg pardon?” Merrill wonders if Hawke is offering to carry her staff, which is charming, if a terrible faux-pas for a mage. Did Bethany never tell her that? Did nobody ever tell  _ Bethany _ ? As Merrill ponders this, Hawke is still talking.

“Being a - never mind,” Hawke scowls and shoves her hands in her trouser pockets, which won’t do at all.

“Oh, being a leader! Yes, obviously. You have to put the clan before yourself in everything you do, which is quite exhausting. Sometimes they’re rather cross at you for it, even if it’s for their own good.” Merrill stops to wipe the bottom of her feet on her calves absently. “I was never very popular, you know, or not with my age-mates. Adults liked me well enough, said I had a head for it, but nobody likes when they know you’re weighing their worth in the grand scheme of things.” 

“That’s exactly it,” Hawke says, and lets the rest of her shoulders slump.

“Oh! Are you the head of your family, Hawke?” Merrill asks. “I hadn’t realised! I thought that was your mother, but that was foolish of me.”

“I shouldn’t be,” Hawke scowls. “But my mother doesn’t have a lick of sense in her. She’s just -- sad, all the time, and all she does is sigh, instead of doing something. She’s always been like that, even when I was young. I had to do everything myself.”

“That’s what it’s like when you’re the eldest,” Merrill agrees. “Although I can’t say anything about your mother, being as I’ve never met her. If she’s sad, you might cheer her up. Does she like flowers? Tea?”

Hawke shakes her head. “Those are luxuries we can’t afford.”

Merrill supposes that Hawke would know best, but that doesn’t seem right if even Merrill can afford tea, and she was just exiled without any human coin. But then again, Hawke does live in a nicer slum than she does, so maybe Hawke just doesn’t know that you can make tea from stinging nettles. “You can make tea from stinging nettles,” she informs her. “They grow in the gutters in the alienage. It’s a rather ingenious use of all the waste down there, when you think about it.”

Hawke just sighs, which is extremely hypocritical, and leads Merrill through the marketplace. They stop at a number of stands, that may all be lead by twins for all that Merrill can tell them apart -- shem all bleed together, after a point, their features so flat and round to her eyes -- to ask if they need a runner or a courier or someone to carry heavy boxes, but they take one look at Merrill’s vallaslin and tell her to fuck off, which is rude. To be expected, in a shem city like this, but rude.

“What about poultices?” Merrill suggests after the seventh such interaction. “I can make herbs and things in my house, maybe. I’d need little jars. Where do you think Anders gets his jars?” She could ask him, but Darktown is the worst place in the world, and Merrill would rather not go there again. Besides, Anders is very _ Andrastian _ and his spirit has picked up the trait as well. She’d rather not have either of them call her a maleficar if it can be avoided. She doesn’t need a shem who lived his entire life in a dungeon classroom to teach her about the Beyond, thanks! Merrill has walked the Korkari Wilds, has lived in the Brecilian Forest, has breathed the air where the Veil is thin and has spoken to the spirits that live on the other side. She knows up from down fine enough on her own.

“I don’t care,” Hawke grunts, and oh, that’s right, Hawke isn’t terribly fond either. Well, Merrill feels vindicated. “Do you know how? To make poultices and things?”

“Well, yes,” Merrill says. “All dalish do. Did I not say that earlier?”

“No,” Hawke says, “You didn’t,” and then drags Merrill off to meet a woman named Elegant. 

Elegant is pretty in that bland way humans like their women, and she makes bedroom eyes at Hawke even though she’s apparently married, and she runs an apothecary. None of those things are interesting, but Hawke seems to consider her a friend, and Merrill isn’t in a place where she can turn something away. She doesn’t know the shem names of a lot of plants, as it turns out; she didn’t even know that they had their own versions of plants! It makes sense after a moment’s thought. All humans do is conquer and burn and steal the work of Elvhen who came before, so it fits that they’d rename plants that predated them on Thedas in their clumsy tongue. Still, though, she knows what the plants look like and how to tend them and what they do, and she is hired to work in something called a hothouse for what are apparently very competitive rates, for an elf. Merrill is fine at maths and accounting, but she hasn’t got the hang of Kirkwall yet, so she takes Hawke’s friend’s word for it. She is told to report to her shift the hour before dawn the next day, which gives her little time to figure out what a hothouse is, but that’s alright.

“Sorry she offered so little,” Hawke says brusquely once they leave, so maybe Merrill shouldn’t have taken Elegant’s word as true after all. 

“Is it little?” she asks, to be sure.

“A human would rate twice that,” Hawke says, and looks deeply uncomfortable about it all. Honestly, she looks a little constipated. Maybe she should ask Elegant for a remedy.

“Well, I’m rather happy being an elf, all things considered”, Merrill says lightly, “So it’s all fine and good.” Hawke’s guilt is appreciated, she supposes, but it’s not productive, and Merrill isn’t a wasteful person. “Thank you for the help. Although I’m sure I’d prefer to barter like we do with the clans. Chasind do the same, don’t they?”

“Do they? I wouldn’t know.” 

Merrill notes the use of  _ they _ and not  _ we _ and considers that. Hawke is a very deliberate person, except for when she loses her patience and yells. That’s very impulsive of her, and Merrill has seen it happen a handful of times in the short time she’s known her. So perhaps Hawke isn’t that deliberate after all, and Merrill is reading too far into this.

“Oh, for sure. The Keeper and I once visited some humans in Dorsov to negotiate safe passage past the village and some trade. It was a curious place, all up on stilts like that, but the barter made things easier for us, for sure.”

Hawke watches Merrill speak with that same pained expression. “I’ve only been in the Wilds once,” she says after a moment. “Once with my father to get my tattoos, and then again to fight at the Battle of Ostagar. Each time I only met one other Wilder.” 

“That’s rather sad,” Merrill says, and frowns when Hawke tenses up again. “I suppose they are an isolated people. We dalish aren’t much better, but we move about out of necessity, of course.” She snaps her fingers at Hawke. “You know Asha’bellanar, though! That’s one more.”

Hawke smiles briefly. “I suppose.”

“So is your mother also Chasind, or just your father?” Merrill asks. She’s never met Hawke’s mother, but Bethany doesn’t have any of the strange shemlen vallaslin that Wilders tend to have, so she could take after either parent. 

“My father. He had markings like mine. Real strict bastard.” Hawke opens her mouth, then shuts it, then opens it again. “Not a popular man.” Merrill assumes this means that Hawke took the comparison earlier poorly. “But it’s like we said -- making decisions, being unpopular.” She seems deeply accepting of this, solemn and heavy. 

“You should try being more cheerful,” Merrill tells her. “No wonder your mother is so sad all the time, if you’re the leader of the family and are so gloomy. Did nobody tell you your face would freeze like that as a child?” Maybe not, if Hawke’s father was as strict as all that. Ashalle used to tell  _ everyone _ that story, it was awful.

“I do enough for my fucking family,” Hawke replies. “I won’t force a smile for them on top of that.” 

“I’m just saying,” Merrill says. “I absolutely hate the alienage, but every time I think that, I tell myself that things could be worse, and I could live in Darktown for instance. And that the alienage isn’t so bad. There’s the stinging nettles, and that large tree.”

“So you want me to lie to myself, every day,” Hawke confirms.

“Yeah, essentially,” Merrill says brightly.

Hawke sighs -- again! -- and says “Oh, Merrill,” as if that’s an answer, and then they lapse into silence until they part ways. 

Hawke is lucky she’s beautiful, Merrill thinks as they wave their goodbyes, because otherwise Merrill might just be cross at her for that. 

**Author's Note:**

> wash your hands & stay home x


End file.
